Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, a method of controlling the same, and a storage medium, and more particularly to an image forming apparatus equipped with an NFC tag that is capable of performing short-range wireless communication, a method of controlling the same, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, NFC (Near Field Communication) which is a type of short-range wireless communication (contactless communication) has come into widespread use in various fields. NFC is a system having a very short communication distance, and is controlled such that wireless communication is established when NFC-equipped devices having an NFC function are made close to each other within several centimeters, and is disconnected when the devices are made far from each other.
A smart poster is a system in which an NFC tag having information written therein is embedded in a poster, and a mobile terminal equipped with an NFC reader/writer is held over the poster, whereby the information written in the NFC tag is read by the mobile terminal. Various information can be written in an NFC tag, and for example, when a URL of a site to which a user is desired to be guided is written in an NFC tag, a mobile terminal having read the NFC tag starts a Web browser, whereby the user can be guided to the desired site.
In the above-described system, special software other than the Web browser is not required to be installed on the mobile terminal. Further, the ease of acquiring information makes the system high in customer convenience, and further, the use of the NFC tag which is inexpensive and requires no power supply makes it possible to introduce the system at low costs. For this reason, there has also been proposed a printing system which is comprised of mobile terminals each equipped with an NFC reader/writer and a printer equipped with an NFC tag, and makes it possible to check the status of the printer and give a print instruction to the printer from each mobile terminal. In such a system, a user is required to install a dedicated application in the mobile terminal in advance, and start the application before using it. More apparatuses other than the printer come to be equipped with various NFC tags, but it is troublesome for a user to select and start an application for each associated one of the devices. To cope with this, there has been proposed a technique e.g. in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2013-45462.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2013-45462 discloses an NFC terminal incorporating an NFC application management device that analyzes, when installing each application using the NFC technique in the NFC terminal, NFC header information of the application to be installed, and forms a list of such applications. If no NFC header information is included in an application to be installed, the NFC application management device transmits application information to an NFC management server. The NFC management server transmits the corresponding NFC header information to the NFC application management device based on the received application information. Further, upon receipt of an application request from the NFC application management device, the NFC management server creates a list of applications which are compatible with the NFC header information, and transmits the created list to the NFC application management device. With such a configuration described above, it is possible to cause the NFC terminal to automatically select a compatible application based on the header information and execute the selected application.
On the other hand, there has been proposed a technique in which information on an application which is desired to be started is written in a specific area of an NFC tag, and the application is automatically started on a mobile terminal based on the application information read from the NFC tag. Examples of the application information include one written in a general form (URI) irrespective of an OS (Operation System) of the mobile terminal, and one written in a form which is different on an OS-by-OS basis (application package). In the case of the URI form, if an application desired to be started has not been installed in the mobile terminal, the mobile terminal does not respond thereto. On the other hand, in the case of the application package form, if an application desired to be started has not been installed in the mobile terminal, the OS of the mobile terminal can start a download service to thereby download the desired application, which is very convenient to the user.
However, a plurality of application information items each written for an associated OS cannot be written in the NFC tag. Therefore, to use the application package form, the printer is required to know the OS of the mobile terminal in advance.